Daily Archives: January 16, 2025

Pixelfed Is an Instagram Alternative That Feels Like a Return to the Glory Days of Photo Sharing with your friends

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Are you one of the many reconsidering their relationship with Meta’s Instagram? If you’re looking for another outlet to share your photos, Pixelfed, an open source photo-sharing alternative without ads or tracking, has officially launched mobile apps for Android and iPhone.

These apps, which allow you to upload photos and videos directly from your phone, arrive just a few days after Meta blocked users from sharing links to the service (prompting a few days of unprecidented levels of traffic in backlash).

Pixelfed, like Mastodon, is part of the Fediverse, meaning people on Mastodon can follow accounts on Pixelfed, and vice-versa. It also means that signing up can be a little confusing to Fediverse neophytes: When getting set up, you will need to choose a server in order to share photos and follow other users. The biggest server, pixelfed.social, is currently lagging due to a large influx of new users, so it’s worth considering the other options presented in the app itself (or browse this directory).

Remember when Instagram was fun?

Decentralization is interesting and laudable, sure, but the thing I like best about Pixelfed is that it feels like a return to Instagram’s glory days. As you might recall, Instagram used to be a photo sharing service. Yes, you technically can still share photos on Instagram, but it’s been a long time since that was the primary focus of the application. Your timeline, once filled with photos from people you follow, is these days dominated by ads and “recommended” videos from celebrities and strangers.

Despite some recent changes to give you back a little more control, Insta is also ruled by the algorithm, which means that when you post a photo, there’s less of a chance that your friends will actually see it. Because of this, the people you care about are probably posting fewer photos than they used to, which in turn frees up the algorithm to put more random videos in your timeline. It’s enough to make you wonder why anyone still uses the service—it’s certainly not for the reasons they signed up for it.

The Pixelfed mobile app, in contrast to Instagram’s current incarnation, is simple. You can scroll through the photos posted by people you’ve chosen to follow. You can see the most popular photos on your server, or the entire Fediverse. Or you can upload photos. These new applications technically aren’t the first Pixelfed apps—there were plenty of third party applications that could access it, and those still exist. But now there’s also an official app, and it works pretty well.

The simple user interface for uploading a photo, which you can take in the app or share from your phone's photo library.
Credit: Justin Pot

Another thing that’s missing from Pixelfed: ads and any kind of tracking. The developer team promises those “features” are never coming. In a Mastodon post, developer Daniel Supernault said “Pixelfed is a lot of things, but one thing it is not, is an opportunity for VC or others to ruin the vibe,” adding that he turned down VC funding and plans to never add ads. “Pixelfed is for the people, period.”

I’m not the kind of tech journalist who likes to make predictions about which applications will “win.” I will say, though, that the internet would be a better place if that mentality were more common.

Source: Pixelfed Is an Instagram Alternative That Feels Like a Return to the Glory Days of Photo Sharing | Lifehacker

I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers

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I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this but everything seems to be going down the tubes quite fast. And not fun tubes, like at a waterpark. The “ending in shit” kind. The issues are complicated, the reasons diverse, but there are a few culprits who have been making themselves extremely visible.

Alongside those holding political office, tech gragillionnaires (I had to invent a new number) like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg obviously wield huge global influence with their computers and numbers and whatnot. There has been a lot written about them and there will be more, as they continue to shape the world and win favour with Donald Trump. Big, scary, probably ruinous things lie ahead. But I’m here to discuss the smaller part. The insult to injury, the sprinkling of salt in the wound.

Whether I am engaging with the news, or with Musk tweeting constantly like a man with no job or friends, or with Zuckerberg sending out weird videos and appearing on Rogan, I am in pain. Not just because I don’t like what they are doing but because they are so incredibly, painfully cringe.

I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.

[…]

Musk’s clear desperation, even as he holds this much wealth and power in his hands, to be thought of as cool. There are endless examples of him embarrassing himself while attempting to be funny or to gain respect. Unfortunately, while you may be able to buy power, it’s impossible to buy a good personality. Watching his Nigel-no-friends attempts to be popular, his endless pathetic tweets that read as though they come from the brain of an 11-year-old poser, has made me start to believe we should bring back bullying. If yet another humiliating report in the last couple of days is to be believed, he appears even to have lost the respect of some of his gamer audience, who the report claims suspect that he may have been lying about his achievements in hardcore gaming (cursed sentence).

Zuckerberg is a different kind of cringe – but cringe all the same. His cringe moments drip through more sparingly but, when they do, my body tries to turn inside out at my bellybutton. His physical makeover for Maga reasons, performing music because no one will stop him, trying to look cool on a surfboard – all these are extremely difficult to watch. He has been trying to suck up to Trump, going on Joe Rogan’s show to say society has been “neutered” and companies need “more masculine energy”.

Putting on what is clearly a bro disguise to join the boys’ club and sit at the big boy table – it should feel humiliating. This came as Zuckerberg rolled back hate speech and factchecking rules at Meta, in a clear swerve to the right before Trump’s inauguration. What could be more masculine and cool than selling out vulnerable communities and women to impress the alpha male?

Climate crises keep coming, genocides continue, women keep getting murdered, art is being strangled to death by AI, bigotry is on the rise, social progress is being rolled back … AND these men insist on being cringe? It’s a rotten cherry on top. This combination of evil and embarrassment is a unique horror, one that science fiction has failed to prepare us for. The second-hand embarrassment we have to endure gets even more potent when combined with other modern influences on young men, like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.

Peterson is a big voice in men’s rights – well, a small Kermit’s voice in men’s rights – and he’s also an embarrassment. So much so that he has his own Know Your Meme page, which covers that time he reportedly retweeted an image from a fetish film, apparently believing it was a Chinese communist “sperm extraction” facility. He deleted it shortly afterwards.

Tate is facing human trafficking charges but rose to fame as a voice for young men, a misogynist in bad outfits who does really cool things like smoking cigars, wearing sunnies inside and trying to drag human rights back 100 years.

Living your life to impress other men by hating women is one of the most embarrassing things I can imagine. Looking up to any of these men for how to live your life is even sadder.

I’ve worked hard to keep these kinds of men out of my personal life, to keep them away from me, out of my goddamn sight. Now they are in my face daily, not only influencing the world for the worse but making me nauseous at how uncool and pathetic they are, on top of their other sins. It’s too much, I can’t take it, there needs to be a change.

It’s time for us to start getting revenge on the nerds.

Source: I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers | Rebecca Shaw | The Guardian

Meta says it isn’t ending fact-checks outside the US yet

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Social media platform Meta has confirmed that its fact-checking feature on Facebook, Instagram and Threads will only be removed in the US for now, according to a Jan. 13 letter sent to Brazil’s government.

“Meta has already clarified that, at this time, it is terminating its independent Fact-Checking Program only in the United States, where we will test and refine the community notes [feature] before expanding to other countries,” Meta told Brazil’s Attorney General of the Union (AGU) in a Portuguese-translated letter.

Meta’s letter followed a 72-hour deadline Brazil’s AGU set for Meta to clarify to whom the removal of the third-party fact verification feature would apply.

It comes after Meta announced on Jan. 7 that it would remove the feature to ensure more “freedom of expression” on its platforms — as part of a broader effort to comply with corporate human rights policies.

Meta’s fact-checking program will be replaced with a community notes feature — similar to the one on Elon Musk’s X — in the US to strike a better balance between freedom of expression and security, Mark Zuckerberg’s company explained to Brazil’s AGU.

It acknowledged that abusive forms of freedom of expression might ensue and cause harm and already has automated systems in place that will identify and handle high-severity violations on its platforms — from terrorism and child sexual exploitation to fraud, scams and drug matters.

Source: Mike Benz

However, Brazil has expressed dissatisfaction with Meta’s removal of its fact check feature, Brazil Attorney-General Jorge Messias said on Jan. 10.

“Brazil has rigorous legislation to protect children and adolescents, vulnerable populations, and the business environment, and we will not allow these networks to transform the environment into digital carnage or barbarity.”

Related: Death of Meta’s stablecoin project was ‘100% a political kill’ — Ex Diem boss

It comes as Meta’s Zuckerberg said he would work with the incoming Trump administration to push back against foreign governments going after US companies to censor more.

Zuckerberg is expected to attend Republican Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

Source: Meta says it isn’t ending fact-checks outside the US yet

Does anyone actually believe the shit Zuckerberg is pushing? It’s a great way to save money. Lots of money. And kowtow to the incoming Oligarch in chief.

Finally USB decides to use sane terminology to label cables

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In 2019, the names used by the USB Implementor Forum’s engineering teams to describe the various speeds of USB got leaked, and the backlash (including our own) was harsh. Names like “USB 3.2 Gen 2” mean nothing to consumers — but neither do marketing-style terms, such as “SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps.”

It’s the latter speed-only designation that became the default standard, where users cared less about numerical gobbledygook and more about just how fast a cable was. (Our reviews simply refer to the port by its shape, such as USB-A, and its speed, such as 5Gbps.) In 2022, the USB world settled upon an updated logo scheme that basically cut out everything but the speed of the device or cable.

Thankfully, the USB-IF has taken the extra step and extended its logo scheme to the latest versions of the USB specification, including USB4. It also removes “USB4v2” from consumer branding.

USB80 Gbps logos USB4

USB-IF

If you’re buying a USB4 or USB4v2 docking station, you’ll simply see a “USB 80Gbps” or “USB 40Gbps” logo on the side of the box now. While it may be a little disconcerting to see a new logo like this, at least you’ll know exactly what you’re buying.

This is a welcome move on several fronts. For one, USB-C ports typically go unlabeled on PCs, so you can’t be sure whether the USB-C port is an older 10Gbps port or a more modern USB4 or Thunderbolt port. (Thunderbolt 4 and USB4v2 are essentially identical, though Intel has its own certification process. Thunderbolt ports aren’t identified by speed, either.) USB-IF representatives told me that they’d heard a rumor that Dell would begin identifying its ports like the primary image above.

The USB-IF is also applying common-sense logos to cables, too, informing users what its throughput and power transmission capabilities are.

Finally, the updated USB logos will also apply to cables. Jeff Ravencraft, president of the USB-IF, said that was done to clearly communicate the only things consumers cared about: what data speeds the cable supported and how much power it could pass between two devices.

Source: An updated USB logo will now mark the fastest docking stations | PCWorld

Mastodon announces transition to nonprofit structure – does what OpenAI should have done

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Decentralized social network organization Mastodon said Monday that it is planning to create a new nonprofit organization in Europe and hand over ownership of entities responsible for key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components. This means one person won’t have control over the entire project. The organization is trying to differentiate itself from social networks controlled by CEOs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

While exact details are yet to be finalized, this means that Mastodon’s current CEO and creator, Eugen Rochko, will hand over management bits of the organization to the new entity and focus on the product strategy.

The organization said that it will continue to host the mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers, which users can sign up for and join the ActivityPub-based network. Mastodon currently has 835,000 monthly active users spread across thousands of servers.

[…]

Last year, the company formed a U.S.-based nonprofit to get more funds and grants with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on the board. At the same time, the organization lost its nonprofit status in Germany.

While Mastodon relies on donations and sponsorships to operate, Bluesky, its main competitor working on a rival decentralized network, is reportedly raising a new funding round from investors at a $700 million valuation.

The blog post noted that the new Europe-based nonprofit entity will wholly own the Mastodon GmbH for-profit entity. The organization is in the process of finalizing the place where the new entity will be set up.

[…]

In the past few months, the ownership of open source projects has been a recurring news subject. For instance, people have questioned control of certain WordPress community projects being in the hands of WordPress’s co-creator Matt Mullenweg. Mastodon is trying to avoid situations where only one person has decision-making powers with today’s new structure.

Source: Mastodon announces transition to nonprofit structure | TechCrunch

Sonos finally CEO steps down after app upgrade debacle

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Smart speaker outfit Sonos has parted ways with CEO Patrick Spence, who oversaw the release of an app that was billed as an upgrade but instead made the company’s products worse and riled customers.

Sonos teased the software in an April 2024 announcement headlined “Sonos Unveils Completely Reimagined Sonos App, Bringing Services, Content and System Controls to One Customizable Home Screen.”

Spence’s canned quote about the app stated: “After thorough development and testing, we are confident this redesigned app is easier, faster and better. It once again raises the bar for the home music listening experience, and sets up our ability to expand into new categories and experiences.”

He was wrong.

When the app emerged in May 2024, we reported, immediate and vociferous complaints that the app was buggy, offered a degraded user experience, was almost impossible to work with for the vision impaired, and omitted features that users liked.

Sonos even admitted it did not intend to remove those features and missed some other bugs that riled customers as they wrestled with a disappointing app.

[…]

the company on Monday announced the CEO had stepped down, effective immediately, and would be replaced by interim CEO and current director Tom Conrad.

[…]

A filing [PDF] reveals that Spence will be paid $7,500 a month until June 30th, and will offer strategic advisory services to ensure a smooth handover until that date. He’ll walk away with a $1,875,000 severance payment too, and keep his stock options.

Conrad will be paid $175,000 each month, and $2.65 million in stock. His canned quote includes a pledge to “focus on delivering extraordinary experiences for our customers and strong results for our shareholders.”

Source: Sonos CEO steps down after app upgrade debacle • The Register

Also see: https://www.linkielist.com/?s=sonos

Researchers make comfortable materials that generate power when worn

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Researchers have demonstrated new wearable technologies that both generate electricity from human movement and improve the comfort of the technology for the people wearing them. The work stems from an advanced understanding of materials that increase comfort in textiles and produce electricity when they rub against another surface.

At issue are molecules called amphiphiles, which are often used in consumer products to reduce friction against human skin. For example, amphiphiles are often incorporated into diapers to prevent chafing.

“We set out to develop a model that would give us a detailed fundamental understanding of how different amphiphiles affect the surface friction of different materials,” says Lilian Hsiao

[…]

Specifically, we wanted to know if we could create energy from friction in amphiphile-modified materials. It turns out we could not only generate electricity, but we could do so while also reducing the friction that people wearing these materials experience.”

In other words, the researchers found they could use amphiphiles to create wearable fabrics with slippery surfaces that feel good against human skin.

[…]

“The technology for harvesting static energy is well established but devices that can be worn for long periods of time are still missing.” Hsiao says. “In our proof-of-concept testing, we found these amphiphile materials not only feel good on the skin but could generate up to 300 volts, which is remarkable for a small piece of material.”

“An optimal balance between friction needed to generate power and maintaining the comfort of the wearer is paramount in designing haptic technologies and amphiphile chemistry offers a facile way to do so,” Khan says. “We’re interested in doing more to make use of these materials, such as exploring how they can be incorporated into existing haptic devices. And we’re open to working with industry partners on identifying new applications.”

The paper, “Compressing Slippery Surface-Assembled Amphiphiles for Tunable Haptic Energy Harvesters,” will be published Sept. 15 in the journal Science Advances.

[…]

Source: Researchers make comfortable materials that generate power when worn | ScienceDaily